


Call 'N Return

by Summerlightning



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: Friendship, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-20
Updated: 2012-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-16 16:34:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/541576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Summerlightning/pseuds/Summerlightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marceline remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call 'N Return

You travel a lot after the whole thing with Ash, mostly because being in the treehouse hurts you too much for you to think about staying there long.  There are reminders of him in it everywhere:  posters of women on the walls; a tube of almost-gone toothpaste lingering on the third shelf of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, mint-flavored the way he liked it.  You even go digging under the bed for a guitar pick, glob, and you end up running your fingers into a sock he left there to molder, and despite that it smells bad you spend a while clutching it, looking down at the sad gray ruin it makes stretched across your palms.  A wretched little part of you wants to reach for the phone and call him, ask him how he’s hanging, but you are over a thousand years old and smart enough to know by now to steer clear of bullshit.

So yeah, you don’t call him.  You throw the sock away, and—without a pick—you play your bass until both your eyes and your fingers burn.

But right, screw the treehouse:  you travel a lot.  It’s easy, traveling, because you’ve got other pads to crash at strewn all across Ooo, and if you happen to visit a place you haven’t claimed a spot in yet, well, you’re not a freakin’ queen for nothing, are you?  All you’ve gotta do is show a little fang to the right sucker and _bam_ , prime digs. 

Not that you _need_ to be treated like royalty all the time.  You might be a queen but you’re a vampire too, a creature of the night, and you can rough it just fine.  Most of the time you prefer to do that anyway.  It appeals to your nature, sprawling on your back under the stars—counting them with your fingers as you listen to the rest of the world fall asleep around you, small sighs and whispers and snores.  Often the moon is a huge, pale coin high in the sky, and you like to tap your thumb against its curve and imagine you could pluck it away and put it in your pocket, free to take it out again to look at later whenever you wanted.

You go places, all kinds.  To the peaks of mountains, where the snow is hard like a shelf underfoot and your breath would steam in the thin, brittle air if you still needed to breathe at all—to valleys low and sweltering.  To the Fire Kingdom, to dance with the natives and show them flames can’t burn you, try as they might in licking over your flesh and hair.  You make friends and lose friends and you party hard, because that’s what you’re good at, and you’re so busy for so long that you almost forget about the treehouse and ever going back to it.

Key word being _almost_.

You go places, all kinds.  To junkyards worn by rain and rust and time, and when you see it sticking up like an arm out of a heap of metal, bright in the sunlight, you think, _Oh, hey, Bonnibel would like that_ , and you stop.

“Bonnibel,” you say, her name slow on your tongue.  It’s summer.  You might not breathe but you _do_ sweat bucketloads, hurray for vampire physiology, and your shirt is sticking in clumps between your shoulders.  The sodden fabric slithers over your skin as you yank at your sleeve.  The fingers of your glove squeak and your eyes sting and you say again, softer this time, wondering, “Bonnibel.  Oh.”

Because ever since that thing with Ash—ever since you packed up and left the treehouse, well, you haven’t so much as glanced in the direction of the Candy Kingdom, let alone visited its princess, and that’s pretty lumping shitty of you considering said princess is like, uh, your best friend.  Instinct sends your eyes skittering to your wrist.  Not that it helps:  you haven’t worn a watch in centuries. 

How long has it been since you’ve seen her?

And then you have another thought, because you are over a thousand years old and you party hard and you make friends and you _lose_ friends.  Yes, you have a thought that skitters around in the back of your brain on horrible little feet, whispering, shuffling.

What if it’s been _too_ long?

For the second time you tug your sleeve.  Your shirt makes a disgusting suction-y sound over your hip, _shrrrp_ , and the thing below you that resurrected your already meager concept of time continues to wink up at you with all the cheer in the world.  _Bonnibel would like that_ , you think again.  So you descend toward it.  Probably it hasn’t been too long, you tell yourself.  Yeah.  Probably it’s just been a couple of months.  Maybe a year.  Two, tops.  And she’ll be mad, oooh, she’ll pitch a _fit_ , but in the end she’ll forgive you and she’ll laugh and smile and—

You reach out to wrench the thing from the pile of junk, the sun searing over the tops of your gloves.  It takes you a while to prize it free because your fingers are trembling. 

It’s the heat, you reason.

The journey back to the Candy Kingdom takes four days.  Bonnibel’s gift is awkward to carry, heavy—it slows you down.  But hey, you’re awesome, right?  Ultimately you make it there, and you don’t even stop to shower first.  Reeking of sweat and something like oil, you stash the present under a tree in the apple orchard next to her castle.  You take off your hat there, your gloves too.  In the west the sun is a threadbare memory of scarlet on the horizon.  Stuffing the gloves in your back pocket, you crack your knuckles, sigh, and rise over the border wall to peer in the direction of Bonnibel’s tower. 

You don’t have a heart that can beat anymore, but still:  your chest tightens and something deep inside it squirms at the familiar sight of the light in her window.  It beckons to you, a cylinder of persimmon flush against the coming night.

She’s sitting at her desk when you knock on the sill.  You see her shoulders tense:  biting your cheek, you watch as she turns—slowly, geez; it must take her a million years—in her chair to check the noise.  Her eyes find yours.  Widen.  Her mouth opens and she rises, tripping over her own feet, to run to you.

Good glob, she’s tall now.  She fills up the window, almost, and you stare at her elbows, at her arms, at her fingers—man, at her _face_ as she fiddles with the latch.  Once she was a giggly pubescent teen who asked for your advice about boys, but time has stretched her:  has smoothed the curve of her cheek into a fainter swell.  The dimple in her chin is gone; her throat is longer, leaner than you remember.  But still she snatches at you, barking your name, and at least the fervent clench of her grasp is something that hasn’t changed at all.

“Yo, Bonni,” you say.  You try to be cool about it.  You downright _struggle_ not to sweep her against you, because she’d probably flail around and fall and plummet to her death, but she pretty much slams her torso into yours and yeah, so much for _that_.

“Marceline,” she chokes.  “Marceline!”  And a third time’s the charm:  “Marceline, oh—”

Wow, _and_ she’s strong!  She hooks her nails in your t-shirt and drags you into her room like a fish on a line, and then her tiara’s crest has its point in your boob, ouch, as she shoves her face into your stomach.  Hot and wet suddenly, said face rolls against the fabric there.  Her arms seize at you even now, her fingers clutching, and you twitch helplessly midair a moment before you rest one of your own palms—clumsy, hard—on her shoulder, sliding down in the tight circle of her embrace to touch your tiptoes to her floor.

She makes a muffled noise in the back of her throat, loosening her grip to let you land.  Her chin skates up your ribs, your arm:  finds your shoulder, a hard notch against harder bone.  She sniffs.  It is a gurgling, syrupy sound. 

“You were gone—” she starts, and you interrupt her with something that’s almost a yelp.  Wide-eyed, she jerks back.  The heels of her hands—she’s laced her fingers together behind you—bump together into the small of your back.  “What?”

“I brought you a present,” you say.  Because no, _no_ , you don’t want to know how long you were gone.  You are over a thousand years old and you make friends and you lose friends and time, oh:  you can’t afford to think about it often.  Like Ash and the treehouse, it hurts you too much.  “It’s just”—you lick your lips and turn your head to study a painting on her wall, how fascinating; from the corners of your eyes you see her mouth pinch—“a little something, not much, but I thought maybe you’d appreciate it and.” 

You stop.  Just like that.  What else can you say?  You’re all out—your tap’s dry and hers isn’t, tears trailing down either side of her face in little rivulets the color of candyfloss.  She sniffs again, her mouth a bruised horseshoe.  You want to cry too.

She’s just so _tall_.

Staring level at her forehead without even having to tip your gaze down, you think that despite how happy you are to see her and she you, maybe she’ll throw you out now.  The scent of her small anger is hot chocolate and foam, and she swallows, her thumbs digging into the scant meat at the base of your spine.  A knot works its way down the spool of her brow.

Then she smiles.  Sniffing one more time, she shakes her head—laughs, a tinkling at once horrible and wonderful, and you see that the dimple in her chin isn’t gone after all, it was just hiding.  Her palms slide forward to curl over your hips, fitting there neatly like they might as well be handles.  Surprising heat jumps in your stomach when she winds her pointer fingers through the loops of your jeans.  You think it might be shame.  Shame or—

Maybe you shouldn’t think. 

She says, “A present, huh?”  She makes a great show of looking you up and down.  “I don’t see a present anywhere, Marceline.”

And that’s that.  There’s no fight in her, none in you either, or at least not enough that it can’t be trumped on both your parts by the happiness of your reunion.  You feel like a huge rotten phallus.  Bonnibel knows it, you realize—she’s a smart cookie, always has been, and the cracked smile breaking the pale porcelain of her face is her mercy.  You screw up your eyes tight against the hot wetness welling behind them.  You answer her, “It’s outside.  In the orchard.”

“I’ll meet you there.”  Shamelessly reluctant, she pulls away from you.  In the shadow of your hip her hand lingers, fingers outstretched.  Her nails hiss across denim.   _Zzzt_.

You say, “Okay.”

**\--**

“Oh, it’s wonderful!” she tells you about three minutes later, and there isn’t appeasement in her voice.  Just curiosity and still _more_ curiosity, layers upon layers of it like an onion that you could never hope to finish peeling even if you gave it your best.  Bonnibel—she’s inquisitive down to her bones.  You’d almost forgotten the intensity of it.  You remember it now, though, pinned by her fuchsia regard flicking between yourself and the present you brought to her.  “But what is it?”

Carefully, like it might break, she rubs her wrist to one of the thing’s handlebars.  It’s dark out now, the sun gone to sleep beneath the hills, but the moon is rising too, covering the orchard in sweeps of stippled violet and indigo.  Her gift gleams in the queer not-light.

Stuffing your hands down into your pockets, you reply, “It’s a bicycle.”

Correction:  it’s a rustbucket.  Seedy brown pockmarks dot the handles, the derailleur, the fenders.  The chain is a sienna rope and the spokes of the wheels are like dirty jagged teeth.  You nevertheless found—after a half-day of scrounging—passable tubes and tires for it, and you put those on and finally oiled everything as best as you recalled how to do it.  You’ve tested it out—you know it will move.

And rustbucket or not, what paint it has left is definitely the most obnoxious shade of pink in the universe.  As you predicted, Bonnibel is delighted by this.

“A bicycle,” she echoes.  On her lips the word rolls.  She’s tasting, testing it.  “Yes, I see.”  Except she doesn’t.  “What is a bicycle exactly, Marceline?  Clearly a device meant for transportation”—her hand drops to squeeze at a tire—“but what sort?  I see no hitch for a cart.  Only this small basket.”

You put that on for her too, the aforementioned basket stuck high and proud between the handlebars.  It took you _forever_.  Who knew there were like ten billion different kinds of screwdrivers?  (Hint:  not you.)

“It’s for fun,” you explain.  “You, uh, you drive yourself around.  You push with the pedals—steer with these.”  Her wrist is still perched on the bicycle’s handgrip, and you pull one hand from your pocket to rest it on the curved, cold plastic nearby her fingers.  Your longer digits make a tent above them.  She grins at you in the gloom.

“And you stop with—?”

“Your feet.”  Against the ground you scuff your own.  “…well.  The pedals again.  With your right foot, yeah, you just push it back and it’ll brake.”

She digests this:  shifts, stepping aside.  Her thumb’s outside snaps up into your palm.  “Hold it steady,” she orders.  Without fear or further aplomb, she hitches up her skirt and clambers onto the bicycle.

The springs beneath the ragged seat squeal.  The whole thing would tip if you weren’t holding it, but since you are it only bobs a bit, faint, as she makes herself comfortable and leans forward, tucking her toes down where they belong like she’s been doing this her whole life already.  “Hey,” you say, “you might wanna take it slow.  This shit’s easy once you’ve got it, sure, but it takes practice—”

“This is practice, then!”  With perfect eager confidence she grips either handlebar.  In her eyes there is a flicker of almost-fear, though, quickly blinked away.  You recognize with a startled, simmering pride that she’s trying to impress you.  “I think I’m balanced.  You can let go now.”

You were never one to deny her much—except maybe time—so you do.  Withdrawing your hand, you let her go.

Her legs pump once, twice, thrice on the pedals.  The bicycle, with another squeal, heaves forward through the orchard’s deepening shade.  Bonnibel’s dress flutters out behind her and for a brief moment you think—sadly, sharply—that she doesn’t need you now if she ever did at all because she’s got it, she’s doing it, she’s just _fine_ on her own—

And then she careens into a tree.

The bicycle bucks her off like a shy horse.  She goes sailing sidelong into the grass, but before she’s even hit the ground you’re smiling so big it’s almost stupid.

“Nice,” you praise her, floating over.  “You okay?”

“Oh glob,” she hisses, “oh no, oh no!”  She sweeps into a sitting position, swaying in place.  On the air now you smell the sugar of her blood, and a glance down reveals an oozing knee and a grass stain smeared up her skirt to match it.   “Did I break it?  Is it ruined?”   She reaches for the stiff splayed corpse of the bicycle still half-tangled in the longest part of her dress.

“It’s fine, sheesh.  Calm down, Princess.”  You kneel to help her.  “If it survived the centuries, it can survive you.”  To confirm this, you give the bell you installed next to the basket a hearty little _bring!_ “See?  No harm done.  …heh.”  But you can’t really lie, can you?  “Except for your dress,” you amend, biting back laughter.  “Pretty sure it’s toast.”

She gives you a long, drawn look that says _no, do you really think so_ and scrunches herself up, tucking her knees to her chest.  Together the two of you work her skirt’s fabric from the lockjaw teeth of the bicycle’s chain.  Overhead the trees whisper, _ssst-sstttt_ , and her shoulder runs its slightness into yours.

“My wardrobe is somewhat limited, you know,” she confesses suddenly.

You did not know that, because the last time you glimpsed Bonnibel’s closet it was, to the best of your recollection, overflowing with frothy pink crap.  You are about to tell her as much when she glances at you sidelong, a plea in the twitch of her mouth.  You settle for, “Limited, huh?”

“Yes.”  Briskly she says this.  “I can’t afford to ruin many more skirts.”  Even though she could—geez, she’s a _princess_.  She could probably afford to ruin a billion skirts.

You don’t say anything.  You blink at her, and you wait.

“Lessons.”  It’s so quiet then, her voice, so small like she used to be, and you ache to hear it.  “It seems I could use a few.  Do you—”  The words stick and she doesn’t want to ask, maybe because it hurts her the same way Ash and the treehouse hurt you—maybe because _you_ hurt _her_.

But hey, Bonnibel is braver than you.

“Do you have time to teach me?” she asks.

You are over a thousand years old, you want to tell her.  You party hard.  You make friends.  You lose friends and time, wow, yeah, you’ve got it.  You’ve got every bit of it in the world and it hurts you, sure, it downright _burns_ you, but not nearly so much as the hopeful, hedging heat of her smile in the dark.

So you say, “Sure.”


End file.
